Okay so you have diamond. Hardest mineral known to man. You also have carbon nanotubes. Strongest material known to man.
Diamond is nice but if you hit it wrong it can break. Are there any theoretical composite materials? Like how car windows have that layer of stuff that holds the glass fragments together if it breaks. That way glass doesn’t go everywhere.
Could artificial diamond be made without these defects?
I guess what I’m asking is could diamond ever be made into a safe load bearing structure?
Are you suggesting diamond with nanotube reanforcement like concrete with rebar?
It’s an interesting idea, but we are a long way away from doing it. I have no idea if it would work. I wonder it the nanotubes might serve as a nucleating site for converting diamond to the thermodynamically favored graphite. For that reason, I don’t think it would be very heat stable. Rather than pure carbon, I suspect you would have to “tie off” the unbonded ends of the diamond with hydrogen near the nanotubes.
Personally, I figure the way to make diamond into a practical building material (assuming, of course, it were cheap enough) would be to make a concrete-like composite, with a diamond aggregate embedded in a matrix of some sort. Threading nanofibers through the matrix probably wouldn’t hurt, either.